Planar binding = unlimited wishes?

[Lonely Tylenol]

I'd like to emphasize that if the efreeti really is that much weaker than the PCs, the revenge shouldn't be coming back later and trying to kill them, since that's too easily solved, but rather looking for other people to get revenge on them instead, and/or going around messing up their plans (impersonating them, trashing their reputation, impersonating allies of theirs and sending them off on wild goose chases, messing with their stuff in secret, messing with their friends)... that sort of thing.

Make the efreeti a wily little {illegitamate son}. A potential BBEG, for that matter.

You know, efreet aren't capable of getting to the material plane under their own power, so it might be difficult to cause trouble. But assuming they do manage to get there and start mucking around with their reputations, I can just see my players' reactions.

"Oh, hey, someone's working against us. [Commune] it's those efreet that we made cast all those Wish spells. [Scry] [Teleport] [repeat] Problem solved, and we get XP. Yay!

 

[AuraSeer]

FTR, note that efreeti do have a dimensional travel abilities. All genies can plane shift at will, to the Astral plane, the Prime Material, or any of the Elementals. (This is easy to overlook; it's under the general Genie heading.) But dimensional anchor probably stops that anyhow.

The easiest way to prevent cheap wishing is by using the line in planar binding that says, "impossible demands or unreasonable commands are never agreed to." The DM can declare that asking an Efreet to grant wishes under duress is unreasonable. Perhaps, for cultural reasons, Efreet take wishes extremely seriously, and flatly refuse to give them out except on their own volition. Binding an efreet to grant a wish would be like binding a paladin to sell his grandmother into slavery; he'll fight to the death first.

If you don't like that idea, then you can revert to the old standby of Turnabout Is Fair Play. That's a bit more complicated, but it has an air of poetic justice that I quite like.

It starts with a mental picture. Imagine that ordinary human NPCs are being magically kidnapped from the middle of a large city in your game world. Every so often a citizen suddenly vanishes without trace, is gone for a day or two, and then just as suddenly reappears in the spot he left. All these victims tell the same story about extraplanar spellcasters who imprisoned them, threatened them with death, and forced them to work as slaves for a short time.

A few people never come back at all. Magical divinations reveal that they attempted to resist their captors, and were slain.

If this started happening in a major human city, the authorities would be understandably upset about it. What is their most probable response? They hire some adventurers, of course!

Your players may get a couple of wishes out of their first couple of kidnappings, but they're in for a rude shock when a party of genie adventurers scry them and teleport into their base in the middle of the night. A couple of raging Efreeti Brb10 are quite a handful, especially when backed up by their buddies of other classes.

In order to avoid being a total bastard, you may want to give your PCs warning of this ahead of time. Tell the wizard's player that he has heard of Bad Things happening to people who abuse outsiders-- all of them end up dead under mysterious circumstances. If he insists on going ahead with the scheme anyway, he deserves the beatdown that he's gonna get.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

And, Efreeti can plane shift.

Whoops. Missed that because it's not in spell-like abilities. (why not?)

Or just say "make an K:The Planes check. You dont think this would be a very good idea. In fact, you're pretty sure it would be a very bad idea."

Yeah, I suppose that revenge is probably the best way to go. Lots of nasty, firey revenge.

 

[Wolfwood2]

I know you aren't looking for house rules, but the smallest possible house rule you could make to change this would be to alter it to:

"1/day - grant up to three limited wishes (to non-genies only)"

A limited wish will still do a heck of a lot and be pretty powerful, without being quite as game-breaking as a full wish. And one could easily say that Efreets themselves don't usually bother making the distinction when they say "wish", because it makes them seem more powerful.

EDIT: And let me say that as a player, I would far prefer the "limited wish" solution to a bunch of stuff about revenge-crazed Efreeti to correct what is really an out of game problem. I mean, if Efreeti revenge is the problem then why not just offer a Efreet a really sweet deal? Obviously there are circumstances under which an Efreeti should offer a mortal three wishes per day, or why give them the ability?

 

[Felix]

Disregarding balance, I think the PCs have found a sound and valid way to obtain +3 to all their stats, if not +5.

However, there are two kinds of consequences:

If the conjurer was polite and offered wealth and riches equal to the value of the wishes, then I imagine the efreeti would be more than happy to oblige him. This route reduces emmensely the amount of wealth the PCs own and so everything is happy here.

If the conjurer threatens execution, then he will earn emnity from that efreeti and likely the efreeti he associates with. Note that these will be noble efreeti, and I can't imagine any of them being pleased at being put in that circumstance. Word will get around and the conjurer will find himself the object of attention of the City of Brass.

Either by making the PCs much poorer or by the PCs incurring wrath, the situation is fine and the consequences balanced; I'd allow them to add inherent bonuses to their abilities without any malicious Wish-perverting or House Ruling.

 

[Infiniti2000]

Disregarding balance, I think the PCs have found a sound and valid way to obtain +3 to all their stats, if not +5.

No, definitely not. How do you refute my post above? It's at most +1 to all stats.

 

[zeb.hillard]

Sample situation:

Bob the efreet enjoys his time at home, doing efreetish things. One day, Bob is summoned to a strange plane he only visits occasionally, and he be imprisoned by the will of an upstart arcanist who forces him to comply with a series of powerful wishes to enhance his captor. Bob willingly complies under the condition that he will not be harmed, he even acts cordially and assists the arcanist with proper phrasings for his wish, so that no harm comes to his captor.

Bob then is sent back home, where he instantly plane-shifts to a location he had set up for just this occasion. He appears in front of a young man, the fifteenth of his line, and speaks with him.

"I, the almighty Efreet Bob, have come to collect my dues from your lineage. The riches and splendor I have granted you finally have come to cost. Adventurer's have exacted a terrible price from me, and I need you to speak several desires you have that will bring them ill."

The noble, who has lived his entire life knowing that one day the honorable efreet Bob may come to ask something of him, does so willingly and promtly. His life was forged by this efreet so that they both could live in safety, and he will not want to see that end.

He wraps his tiny little human hands around one of the efreet's fingers and proclaims "I have captured you, mighty Bob! He who possesses a name no mortal can pronounce nor hear, due to it's sheer majestic magnitude! I wish for you to end the lives of those that wronged you, destroy them in mean and vicious ways that will make their mothers weep and their children strike their name from their books of lineage...make atrocities linked with their name, and force them to rue the very day they thought to trifle with your power!"

And then...the adventurer's? Well...quite bad things happened to them...since the efreet has the choice to interpret the wish any way he wants....

 

[pallandrome]

Yeah, if a genie with the ability to grant wishes can't mess with the players, who can?

 

[Hypersmurf]

Whoops. Missed that because it's not in spell-like abilities. (why not?)

For the same reason that you won't find the description of 'Protective Aura' or 'Tongues' under Astral Deva, Planetar, or Solar; nor will you find the description of 'Blindsight' under Black Pudding or Gelatinous Cube; nor will you find the description of 'Summon Mephit' under Air Mephit or Dust Mephit.

It's already defined under the main entry... in this case, 'Genie'.

-Hyp.

 

[Wolfwood2]

If the conjurer was polite and offered wealth and riches equal to the value of the wishes, then I imagine the efreeti would be more than happy to oblige him. This route reduces emmensely the amount of wealth the PCs own and so everything is happy here.

But what is the value of the wishes? Essentially it's the value of the Efreeti's time, plus mark-up. Only meta-game considerations say that it needs to be valued equivalently to the cost of a wizard casting a wish. Why should the Efreet charge enormously more than for the use of any of his other 3/day spell-like abilties.

Whereas my "limited wish" solution fixes the problem, while still allowing the efreeti to do the "grant three wishes for a mortal" thing they are supposed to be doing.

I say again that there should be circumstances under which efreeti are using their 3/day wishes at the behest of human beings. Otherwise what's the point of giving them those abilities, with that limitation, in the first place?

He wraps his tiny little human hands around one of the efreet's fingers and proclaims "I have captured you, mighty Bob! He who possesses a name no mortal can pronounce nor hear, due to it's sheer majestic magnitude! I wish for you to end the lives of those that wronged you, destroy them in mean and vicious ways that will make their mothers weep and their children strike their name from their books of lineage...make atrocities linked with their name, and force them to rue the very day they thought to trifle with your power!"

And then...the adventurer's? Well...quite bad things happened to them...since the efreet has the choice to interpret the wish any way he wants....

Whenever I hear little DM-lesson fantasies like this, I have a fantasy of my own. I have a fantasy of being a player who just bulls ahead and lets the DM destroy my PC. And then afterwards, I'd ask him,

"But who really lost more here, oh DM? I can make a new character in an hour or so, and it will be fun and interesting to do that. You, on the other hand, have to deal with the disruption in your campaign and ending the story we were collectively telling on a sour note. You have to be the one to worry about fitting my new character in and abandoning all the plot threads from my old character. All because you refused to address an out of game problem, out of game. So good luck with that."